Cloud evangelist with a passion for Microsoft Private Cloud and Public Cloud. Hopefully you will find something useful here.
-Kristian Nese

Monday, October 8, 2012

System Center 2012 SP1 - Virtual Machine Manager - The Review

System
Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager – The Review

When I
was so honored to receive the MVP award in 2010, it was in the Virtual Machine
Manager expertise. This component lays close to my passion for virtualization
and cloud computing in general, and it’s a core component in Microsoft's cloud solutions.

I have
been using Virtual Machine Manager since the 2008 version and watched the
development with big enthusiasm. The launch of System Center 2012 was beyond
impressive, and Service Pack 1 – that will support Windows Server 2012
(Hyper-V) will be even more stunning.

System
Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager is the management layer for your
infrastructure like virtualization hosts, storage, networking (pooled
resources) so you can deliver cloud services to your business and customers. I
believe that there’s no need to dive into all the features in Hyper-V in
Windows Server 2012, because you have most likely heard a lot of them by now.
The bottom line is that many organizations, independent of the size of their
businesses, are looking towards Microsoft’s premium hypervisor in these days.
All the known challenges and limitations from earlier versions are now addressed
in this release. Multi-tenancy, VM mobility, optimization in the entire stack,
and simplified management, licensing and disaster recovery to mention a few,
will automatically give your ROI a solid burst.

Virtual
Machine Manager is an abstraction layer above your infrastructure and you can
manage those components completely from a single pane of glass.

Investments
made in storage will let customers benefit from JBOD and commodity hardware in
their environment by using file storage
(SMB 3.0) as an alternative to block storage (iSCSI, FC) which is often
associated with expensive SAN’s, switches and cables.

Virtual
Machine Manager will leverage SMB and file shares (also scale-out file servers)
and take care of the required configuration (no need to map permissions on individually
shares and folders).

Of
course, if you have invested in a SAN solution, you can leverage this from VMM
as well with the support for SMI-S protocol.

To
summarize the value of VMM for your fabric, VMM will support the lifecycle of
your resources. All the way from bare-metal deployment of virtualization hosts
by using PXE, creation of clusters, servicing and maintenance through the
integration with WSUS. Needless to say, the bigger environment you got, it’s
more likely that VMM will be a good friend of you.

Complexity
and simplification

Network
virtualization is a key feature in Hyper-V to support multi-tenancy. It’s a
very powerful technique to scale your network as well, by using IP
encapsulation – which is default in VMM (requires only one PA from the physical
network fabric, instead of one PA for each CA if you are using IP rewrite). To
configure network virtualization in Hyper-V without VMM, you must polish your
kung-fu skills in Powershell. With all the respect to powershell, it’s great to
configure and automate every single process in your system, but with network
virtualization, it’s hard to manage a dynamic environment. And especially large
environments with multiple hosts and clusters. This is where VMM comes to the
playground and takes care of every bit, acting like a policy server controlling
IP pools, VM networks and also routing within your environment, and also
outside your network.

Beyond
virtualization – and beyond private cloud

For those
of you who have already played with the Beta, VMM introduces tenants in this
build.

A tenant
administrator can create and manage self-service users and VM networks. They
can create and deploy their own VMs and services using the VMM console and a
web portal.

To see the
big reasons for this, we must first see the big Picture.

System Center 2012 SP1 – Orchestrator will include SPF – which is
Service Provider Foundation.

This will let customers use VMM, OpsMgr and Orchestrator together in a
multi-tenancy environment.

To explain this as simple as possible, you can use the SPF-activities
in Orchestrator to create runbooks that will communicate with the VMM web
service through OData, and use REST.

You can connect to SPF by using your own existing portal, Windows Azure
Services for Windows Server and also System Center App Controller.

An interesting scenario here is when you have reached your capacity in
your own private cloud, you can connect to a SPF-cloud (which could be a
partner, or another cloud vendor) to increase capacity and scale to meet your
needs. There might be reasons why you can’t use, or won’t use IaaS in Windows
Azure for this, and that’s when this is really handy. Needless to say, App
Controller will of course manage IaaS in Azure so that you can deploy virtual
machines both on-premise and to the big blue cloud.

So you are interested in the best management tool for your cloud
infrastructure?

-Guess what!

System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager will be the ultimate
solution for you. Not only embracing the components in your own datacenter, and
integrates with the other components of System Center, but it is also a
framework to deliver automated and effective cloud solutions to your customers.